"The Great Influenza"

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SooBee
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:24 pm

"The Great Influenza"

Post by SooBee »

Written by John M. Barry.
A New York Times best seller and the best description of the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 that I have read.
Even the science bits and the political stuff is full of eye-opening answers to so many questions you might have wondered about.

Yes it is a 'heavy read' at times but it needs to be as a preparation for the epidemic itself. I find myself really appreciating the characters who paved the way for so many changes in medicine in the years leading up to and after WWI. They really were fighters of the best kind.
Toddie
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Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 5:30 pm

Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by Toddie »

Are you a big reader? The reason i ask is because i'm not, but this sounds like it might be worth the time reading. The fact it's a "heavy read" puts me off a little.
Area 8.

"Better to have and not need, than to need and not have"
SooBee
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:24 pm

Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by SooBee »

I've always been a reader. It stretches my world into places I would never go.

I call this book a heavy read but taken slowly, it is beautifully written and perfectly easy to understand. It is just so full of information that I have to wade through the science bit to get there. I spent some time in nursing so I was well enough grounded to find my way easily enough but it is at the molecular level and it needs to be to show how virulent the epidemic was. Take it a page or so at a time in places and digest it carefully.

I never knew how much the political ambitions and hang-ups of the 19th century slowed progress in medicine down. No wonder little fighters like Florence Nightingale had such a hard battle. She was not on her own. In America, where the epidemic started, a doctor was not expected to be a scientist and often had no experience of laboratory work. The fight in the last part of the 19th century to get people properly trained was a huge battle and all the details of it with its heroes and villains make a great read.

Suddenly the past with all its problems comes to life on the page, even as so many fine people were dying in a dreadful war. This story is huge and deserves having a bit of time taken over it. It is not just a tale of "derring-do" but a linking of many stories about great people who seem just shadows a hundred years on. As an example, I shall never look at President Wilson again without viewing him as a bit of a lunatic let loose in a fragile world.
SooBee
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Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by SooBee »

As an afterthought, it is possible to start this book at "Part IV - It Begins" and use the earlier parts of the book like a forward.

What it really lays out for us is the way that our history can teach us how to manage our future better. There are some similarities today in the management of information reaching the people and the "need to know" attitudes of the powers that be. This book shows that free and open information would have saved many lives.
SooBee
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:24 pm

Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by SooBee »

I shall keep going as I read so as to give you some awareness of what the book is trying to tell us.
We do need to learn from this one.

I'm only a third of the way through and some of the best prepared hospitals in America are almost empty one day and so full of the dying a couple of days later that many have to be closed. These are NOT newly arrived war-wounded. They are influenza victims from the army camps in America (young soldiers yet to go to war). Not only are the patients dying but so are the doctors and nursing staff. This is soul-destroying for the people who thought they were some of the best prepared in the world. Civilian hospitals are just as bad. The descriptions of wards untended and mortuaries full to bursting with neatly laid out bodies with no coffins and crowded into tidy rows are indeed a lesson to us. Only mass graves can follow.

Should we believe the information about preparedness that we are always given?
Things can go bad so fast that the medical facilities can be completely overwhelmed.
Arzosah
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Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by Arzosah »

Thanks for posting, SooBee, I'm watching the thread with great interest.
SooBee
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 4:24 pm

Re: "The Great Influenza"

Post by SooBee »

Thanks.
I know the weight of this book might put our nice normal folks off but I believe that truth is the best informer and is best digested intact...even if it scares the living daylights out of us. Believe me when I say this book does nothing to help my peace of mind.

We all probably know a little about this epidemic and found a little to be quite enough. The descriptions in this book go way beyond that and put us into the wards and the city streets. We feel the fear and the disbelief too. Every family is touched by this one. It is like the Great Plague in London and in some ways looks like it too. This one is often nursed at home because, as keeps being quoted, "It is Influenza - only Influenza...". By the time it becomes unmanageable at home, the hospitals are completely over-run and often the doctors and nurses are sick too. In fact the medics of all levels simply work until they drop (or they run).

This is right across the country (America) and the rest of the world follows. So there is no help from elsewhere - no teams from abroad to go in and help and no replacement staff when the hard-pressed medical and nursing staff sicken and die. There are nightmare situations when it comes to disposal of bodies: piled in morgues from floor to ceiling like cords of wood in a woodshed, left in peoples' houses because they can't be collected and filling the undertakers' buildings because they can't be buried.

They don't die easily either...great pain and a lot of blood. Whole overcrowded hospitals doing the same thing...enough to terrify anyone entering a ward. It was a time of over-riding fear and superhuman courage.

And believe it or not I think I need to go back and read the middle of the book again because it was so full of information and I don't want to get it tangled.